Pages

Sunday, February 19, 2012

J.R.R. Tolkien argued, toward the end of his essay “On Fairy Stories,” that one of the gifts fantasy brings to humankind is a glimpse of
joy, a sudden “turn,” an undeserved gift. It does this through an outcome he
called “eucatastrophe.” (The prefix “eu-” comes from the Greek language and
means “good.”)

Tolkien thought fairy stories bring us consolation from a
“catastrophe” turned good, or (put the other way) happy endings tinged with
sadness. Later fantasy, following in Tolkien’s shadow, has not always kept faith
with this idea. Two trends in fantasy novels, though apparent opposites, both
diverge significantly from Tolkien’s vision.

First is the (rightly criticized) tendency for fantasy-novel
heroes to be invincible. Facing ludicrously powerful forces of evil, they come
through unscathed. This quality, whenever we see it, fails to measure up to
Tolkien’s perception of “eucatastrophe” because it overemphasizes the “eu” part
and forgets the other: catastrophe. Something terrible has to happen, some
irreparable damage has to be done to somebody we care about, or the good outcome loses its
poignancy and joy. If you want an excellent illustration of this, just think of
Frodo before he leaves Middle Earth. Frodo is damaged—irreparably so. His
heroic feat costs him his “humanity,” if I can call it that.

That outcome is not accidental. For Tolkien, there can’t be
any consolation where genuine suffering is not recognized. (Anybody who’s ever
been handed a platitude in the face of real personal tragedy knows this.) If
the hero of a fantasy story is, in effect, invincible, a person who never
suffers real injury or hardship, then the tale will be incapable of giving us
one of the gifts that is fantasy’s birthright—at least, according to Tolkien.

Many people—readers and writers and editors among them—have
been unsatisfied with such invincible heroes. As a result, we’re seeing an
opposite trend, a reaction that also, however, fails to fill the role Tolkien
envisioned for “fantasy.” Bluntly: I’m talking about so-called “gray
characters.” These characters are “human,” at our worst and most egocentric.
They lie, cheat, avenge themselves. If they do something “good,” it’s for
despicable reasons. There’s no “good” versus “evil,” no heroes and villains,
just the soft, spongy middle.

This, we are told, is “gritty realism.” And it might be
that, but it’s also not “eucatastrophe.” It’s not what you get in the fairy
stories. It gives no consolation—far from it. The accent has shifted to the
“catastrophe”—except that here there isn’t “evil” in the old sense of the word,
either. Catastrophe becomes the constant, the uninterrupted state of existence.

The first departure—failing to embrace the existence of real
suffering, so that consolation can be provided by the unexpected “turn”—might
be relatively harmless next to this second one. Because a brutal insistence on
only “gray characters” and death and mayhem may—I hope not, but it probably
does—amount to a denial of the possibility of “joy,” of hope, of the dream of
goodness, that the fairy stories sometimes offered. Certainly Tolkien’s work
offered it: those of us who love it are left with a keen yearning to visit
Minas Tirith under Aragorn’s benevolent rule, or (for us democratic Americans)
a long stay in the Shire, among people (hobbits, that is) who are genuine if a
little provincial.

No doubt, many and greater champions of Tolkien can be found
than me, but I want to join my voice to theirs. His characters are not perfect,
and they aren’t unrealistic or one-sided, either. The best example here is
Frodo. Think of it: he starts out good, he wants to do the right thing—so far,
I think that’s like most of us. Check one. He’s a “little person” faced with
forces beyond his control or understanding or capacity to overcome. Check
two—so are most of us. Frodo’s asked to do something extraordinary, and he
reluctantly agrees. Some of us have done the same; many of us, for instance,
faced with an invalid child or parent make the “good” choice, the “right” one,
the unselfish one, to care for that child or parent ourselves. People make such
hard choices every day. Yes, their motives might be mixed. But they embark,
wanting to do the right thing. And don’t forget, Tolkien lived during an era
renowned for self-sacrifice. So, check three.

But what happens to Frodo at the end of this story? Let’s
fast forward to the culmination of his quest, when he stands at the cracks of
Mount Doom and, after all his work and all his suffering for “doing the right
thing”—he fails. He can’t quite bring himself to do the self-sacrificial deed he
intended at the beginning. He puts on the ring and he, little exhausted Frodo,
defies Sauron. Check four—most of us would have failed too, in analogous
circumstances. Think of the dutiful person taking care of that invalid child or
parent, day after day, year after year. And losing, in the midst of all that,
the thread of why she was doing it. And maybe coming to loathe the child or
parent, in small and maybe larger ways. Or maybe feeling cheated in life—and
even acting out to restore the balance.

As fantasy should for Tolkien, the “eucatastrophe” comes as
the result of an unexpected turn. Gollum bites off the finger; Frodo’s original
resolve is brought about despite his failure at the end. That part doesn’t have
to be “realistic,” because this is “fantasy”—it draws on the fairy tale
tradition, where such a turn is part of the magic of the story itself. How does
Cinderella win the day without that lost slipper? Or the magic that got her to
the ball? If you want nitty-gritty (and who doesn’t, sometimes?), fantasy might
not be the best place to seek or find it.

But the catastrophe isn’t over yet. Frodo is damaged; he can
no longer continue in Middle Earth. He’s saved his world from oppressive
malice, but he’s lost the world for himself. He exits the novel a wounded figure.
The battle against evil takes a real toll.

No, Tolkien’s characters and realms aren’t perfect; they
have their faults and weaknesses. But when it really matters, they normally do
the right things, or at least they want to. I think that’s more like most of
us, or at least more of us than some folks like to admit. But even if you think
all humans are so hopelessly corrupt that no one would have done what the
“fellowship” did, the role of fantasy is not to show us the world as we
normally live it, but rather to offer us a vision of the world that’s touched
by “faerie,” by a magic that’s not about grasping but dreaming. Part of that
dream is for people, realms, choices, that are good, at least in part. Or at
least they struggle toward being good. And in the outcome, as cliché as some
people may find it, without the “happy ending” that Tolkien said was
“essential”—a happy ending tinged with sad, real loss—fantasy might just turn
out not worth the hard work it demands.

[Note: This is the third of three posts on Tolkien’s essay,
“On Fairy Stories.” The other two are here and here.]

John writes mythic fantasy and science fiction for adults and children. His latest story, "Son of Mist," appeared in the April edition of Bards & Sages Quarterly. Check out his webpage for some free stories.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

One of the delights of fantasy novels is their ability to
take us to places we’d like to go. If that’s true—I think it usually is—then
it’s interesting that so many fantasy novels take place in a kind of medieval
world.

If you think about it, most of us were taught in school (or somewhere) that the Middle Ages were a superstitious,
unenlightened age, where people died young from plagues and constant warfare,
and they had to sleep on dirt or stone floors and live indoors without good
windows. Those were the “dark ages.” No science; no medicine. Nobody could read,
either, so people didn’t get to think for themselves.

If you’re American, you also were probably taught to
associate that time with the terrible idea of “kings,” both high kings and
petty ones. I remember in particular learning about the feudal system, with
peons and lords and constant battles, and walled cities and the whole thing.
Nobody envied those peons. Nobody thought highly of those lords, either.

So, if I’m remembering correctly, if all of us really were
taught to think of the Middle Ages as backward and superstitious, why do we all
want to go there?

Before I hazard a guess, I want to point out one thing that
rarely gets included in the fantasy medieval past: the Church. If you dip into
a book like A Day in a Medieval City, by
Chiara Frugoni, you’ll discover that the Church was everywhere in the Middle
Ages. It was in the middle of most cities (which weren’t all that large), and
there were monasteries, abbeys, and such things all around the countryside.
(Twain’s Connecticut Yankee makes
good dramatic use of this fact.) Churches and steeples and friars and monks
appear all over medieval tapestries—as do hell, and the manifold torments of
its occupants. To use a Twain-esque expression, you couldn’t swing a … er, rope
… without hitting a monk or a friar or some other cleric, in the medieval past.

My point is that the fantasy novel doesn’t give exactly a
realistic picture of medieval life. I don’t mean that it should. For one thing,
this strange silence about religion, which you’ll find in Tolkien already,
might be due to the fairy tale and folktale influence on the genre. After all,
European folktales were passed down—if not invented—in a society permeated by
the Church and its representatives. And yet, rare is the monk or nun or friar
in one of these tales, and far more seldom still is the tale really
“religious,” especially “Christian,” in any explicit way. (This topic is for
another day.) Moral, yes; religious, not especially.

So one possible caricature is: Fantasy novels happen in a
vaguely medieval society where, as in fairy tales, the Church is not a real
player—religion isn’t the point. To answer our question—“Why?”—you might say
that fantasy novels, out of respect for tradition, take place in the same
half-articulate social set-up that the folktales assume.

But I think it goes beyond that. I think for many fantasy
fans, we experience a longing for a pre-technocratic society. We want to “go
there,” where you have to start a fire with a flint (whatever that is) and, if
you’re going to reach a remote kingdom, you have to walk through a barren
countryside where there aren’t any good roads or automobiles or railroad
tracks. Maybe a forest. This might be happening in some land that we can’t find
on a map—in fact, all the better. We just want to go there, to Middle Earth
(maybe especially there), and live where elves are not far off and dwarves
might be inside a mountain. Or dragons might still plague people who live in
houses with roofs of thatch. Something about that pre-plastic, pre-automobile,
pre-highway, pre-Walmart, existence entices us.

And another thing: we seem to sometimes perceive the
“good”—whatever that is—more clearly there, where the technology doesn’t get in
the way. Free of its cords and electric pulses, its clutter, we perceive the
“evil” there more sharply, too. And that, again, is a legacy of faerie, I
expect. For there, in that world of brilliant color and deep shadow,
uncluttered as it is by smokestacks and water towers, we sooner expect to
encounter the magic that we crave, from some “other world,” hanging around the
bend. Yes, even though we know that magic to be full of peril, unpredictable, and
ever unwilling to bend its rules to the self-absorbed. Yes, because somewhere we seem to cling to that old-fashioned idea ...

John writes mythic fantasy and science fiction for adults and children. His latest story, "Son of Mist," appeared in the April edition of Bards & Sages Quarterly. Check out his webpage for some free stories.

Friday, February 3, 2012

I find I’m not finished with my musings on Tolkien’s essay
“On Fairy Stories.” There’s a lot there worth pondering, especially in a blog
like this that would not exist, strictly speaking, were it not for that essay
and its author.

In the essay, Tolkien claims that fairy stories offer
special gifts to humankind. What they do for us, they do better than anything
else. He calls these gifts fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation.

“Fantasy”—it doesn’t mean for him what you might think.

First, it’s obvious when reading Tolkien’s essay that he’s
using the term in a new way. He describes “fantasy” as an almost elfish craft
of creating stories that involve the “faerie” realm—or at least magical,
non-realistic elements from “faerie.” But—and this is equally important—such
stories also maintain an internal consistency or “reality” (or “truth”) within
them.

Tolkien is not trying to invent a new “genre” here: he’s
trying to revitalize an age-old practice or aspect of human culture—“a right of
humanity” I think was his phrase. That “human right” is to create and prize
such stories, for adults. In his time,
fairy tales had been relegated to children and studied (but not openly enjoyed)
by adults. I suspect things haven’t changed that much, except that more adults
today would probably admit they enjoy fairy tales. But fairy tales are still,
as then, enjoyed by … not everyone.

(Incidentally, very few subscription-based magazines openly
seek out original “fairy stories” for publication. Most of those are children’s
magazines.)

Fast forward sixty plus years. I think it’s fair to say
that, currently, more fantasy novels are being published and read than fairy
tales—although (as I’ve discovered) some fairy tale collections score
prominently in the rankings, and people who like fairy tales really like them. Ironically, Tolkien acted as midwife to
the creation of this genre we call “fantasy.” Well, he had plenty of help from
the publishing industry, which saw an opportunity for profits, subsequently
realized. The results are staggering. One website dedicated to such things
lists almost twenty subgenres under the “fantasy” label, and condescends to
include Tolkien in its lists, though not without severe criticism of his Middle
Earth novels.

I offer no quibble to the bewildering array of fiction
marketed under the label “fantasy,” though my personal preference is for
fantasy with links to folktale and myth. (I also like sci-fi, which I
experience as a different genre; its roots go back well before Tolkien’s work.)
In my own tastes, I’ve obviously been influenced by Tolkien’s. For him,
“fantasy” that is not somehow drawing on folktale or myth, set in some form of
“faerie,” is a sort of contradiction in terms. But then, as I said, he was
talking about a faculty, a human capacity for storytelling that washes and
revitalizes the world: not a genre of fiction. And, in fact, Tolkien viewed
“fantasy” as high literary art, superior in many respects to what is usually
classed as “literary fiction.” His quibble with literary critics runs through
various parts of the essay, and is probably familiar to every serious Tolkien
fan.

I think it’s fair to say that not all “fantasy” (even on NPR's 100 Best list)
is “high literary art,” even when it sells well. The production of books that
entertain lots of people and consequently make huge amounts of money … is what
it is. But commercial success and high literary art have no intrinsic
correlation: a novel can be one or both or neither. Tolkien’s LOTR is obviously both: a pioneering work of stunning
imaginative power, realized potential, and rich complexity, with a lingering
effect on the reader—and it’s sold many, many copies.

But Tolkien’s epic is “fantasy” because it takes place in
“faerie”—of a particular sort, if I can put it that way. And yet, LOTR is a new creation that gathers many leaves from the
“tree of tales” and weaves of them a compelling story that makes the reader see
the “real world” in a new way. By Tolkien’s terms, then, his own work is
“fantasy,” while much that followed in his train is … not so much.

So, if you’ve ever wondered why you like Tolkien, and fairy
tales, and some fantasy, but you’re lukewarm about much that sells under the label
“fantasy”—well, maybe what you want is “fantasy” of a different kind. Look for
“faerie”—tales that tap into the wonder, magic, and mythic landscape of the
human imagination.

NOTE: This is the second of three posts on Tolkien's essay. Check out the first and the third.

John writes mythic fantasy and science fiction for adults and children. His latest story, "Son of Mist," appeared in the April edition of Bards & Sages Quarterly. Check out his webpage for some free stories.